Monthly Archives: April 2016

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A photo from the back cover of the book, which implies this has to do with how baseball help distract locals during Dominican Republic’s Parsley Massacre led by dictator Rafael Trujillo against the neighboring Hatians.

The pitch: Scott Rowan connects dots, deciphers codes, and advances theories.
Maybe as bizarre as ones as he can find.
Like Art Bell and UFOs.
If a baseball-related book can be both enjoyable and disturbing, invigorating and brow-raising, Rowan, who previously wrote “The Cubs Quotient: How the Chicago Cubs Changed The World” in 2014, can probably make you believe that the ivy covered walls of Wrigley Field were done that way so that camouflaged spies could send signals easier to those at the Chicago Navy base.
Taking the research approach that you can’t know everything you think you already know, Rowan goes through world history and pinpoints how baseball had an “often-hidden role” in government policy, military planning, religion, commerce, innovation, entertainment, social control, crime, gangs, law and order.
Yes, it’s mind-blowing.Rowan, a journalist from a military intelligence family background, just can’t help himself.
Rowan admits in the end that perhaps ignorance is bliss, but “it can be dangerous. My goal is to help sports fans and the general public get a peek behind the curtain of many aspects of life that they take for granted, never knew about or felt was imagined or unreal.”
Start with perhaps how the Yankees got their name. It’s beginnings go to the famous song “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which British troops used to sing in mock of U.S. military during the Revolutionary War. What’s the song really about? Rowan explains. We’ll leave it that.Continue reading “30 baseball books for April ’16, Day 28: Is that a bat in his hand or a battering ram?” »

For those on the spectrum of conspiracy theoreticians, there’s one going around this week that the NFL has squeezed the Rams to wait until Thursday evening — when they’re officially on the clock at the 2016 Draft in Chicago — to reveal who they’ve decided to pick with the No. 1 overall choice.
Don’t spoil the suspense for ESPN and the NFL Network, both of whom air the draft that officially starts at 5 p.m., or prime-time in the East. When it’s up against “The Big Bang Theory.”It became a topic, interestingly enough, on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” on Monday. Co-host Michael Wilbon got a little squirmy about it — as he should. He’s now asked to comment about whether the company he works for about whether it should comply to this request.
“Are we sure the NFL asked this, or did the TV networks ask it?” he responded.
Co-host Tony Kornheiser seemed a lot more subdued about it. It’s a TV show, he rationalized. He was fine with it.
“You want to get higher ratings,” he said, “You get higher ratings if there is a certain amount of suspense … If there is going to be a team that would help to create drama to make ratings, it would be a team in Los Angeles. I am OK with it, I don’t think it is bad.”
We’re bothered by the assumption that the league can so easily manipulate a network, even its own. Yet anyone with a true journalistic sense of duty would take this as a challenge to dig deeper through all the obfuscation. Produce a nugget of information prior to when it’s officially announced — a no-doubt true find. Perhaps it would then be just a matter of whether his editors would allow it to get on the air before the pick.
You could go with the Stephen A. Smith method and just guess loudly, with your chances here appearing to be 50/50, and wait for the outcome.
With that, ESPN’s 37th year of coverage begins officially with a “draft countdown” from 4-5 p.m. Thursday and the first round scheduled from 5-8:30 p.m. It’s a production that includes 27 cameras to capture Chris Berman, Mel Kiper Jr., Jon Gruden, new “NFL Front Office Insider” Louis Riddick, reporter Adam Scherfter, Suzy Kolber and a host of others.Trey Wingo and Todd McShay join Kiper, Riddick and Schefter for coverage of rounds two and three (Friday at 4 p.m.) and rounds four to seven (Saturday, 9 a.m.)
The Culver City-based NFL Network boasts of more than 70 hours of live coverage during the week that started last Sunday. Rich Eisen and Mike Mayock are the point men, with Charles Davis, Daniel Jeremiah, Michael Irvin, Deion Sanders, Kurt Warner, Michael Robinson, Steve Mariucci, Brian Billick, Ian Rapoport, Melissa Stark and Rhett Lewis. Their “red carpet” special starts Thursday at 3 p.m.
At NFL.com, Matt “Money” Smith anchors the coverage starting at 5 p.m. Steve Wyche is the NFL Network reporter covering the Rams’ draft party at LA Live.

== As for Chris Mortensen, continuing a second round of intense treatment in Houston for Stage IV throat cancer since January, and about to miss ESPN’s coverage of the NFL Draft this weekend for the first time in 25 years.
The 64-year-old told us in a recent email that speaking right now “is somewhat painful, although I have numbing med for it. Radiation.”
He said he has at least another month of treatment to go.
“The draft was always my top calendar date,” he wrote. “It’s the first time I appeared (thank you, Fred Gaudelli) on ESPN in 1991. Can’t believe I’m going to miss it, though I am pretty wired through the magic of text messaging.”
Mortensen, a North Torrance High grad and El Camino College alum, covered high school sports and the Dodgers for the Daily Breeze before leaving to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1983. We tried several times this week to tackle a Q-and-A about the draft and how he might be participating, but additional treatments precluded him from being up for it.
Prayers continued as we keep him, as well as TNT side reporter and SI cover story subject Craig Sager, in our thoughts. Continue reading “Weekly media notes version 04.27.16: Really, we’re waiting for a big NFL/Rams reveal?” »

The pitch: Combining the 742 pages already documented for “Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball” in 2007, and 720 more for “Connie Mack: The Turbulent and Triumphant Years, 1915-1931” in 2012, Macht has managed to convince the publisher to allow 2,134 pages and hundreds of thousands of words to go beyond the summation of the life and baseball times of Cornelius McGillicuddy, a man who was managing his 50th and final year with the Philadelphia Athletics when Vin Scully began his broadcasting career in Brooklyn in 1950.
Mack died six years later, at age 93.
From exhaustion, perhaps.
The exhaustion that one would even have after reading the 5,700-word piece that Wikipedia fashioned for him.We won’t pretend to say we made it through the first two editions of the “Tall Tactician” that chronicle in every-so-detailed detail his five World Series titles, his ridiculous amount of 3,731 wins — almost 1,000 more than anyone else, despite a sub-.500 record — and a 10-year-playing career before all that from 1886-96 (the last three as player-manager for the Pittsburgh Pirates).
This third deposit gets through the weight of a far less joyous time in his life than the first two – here, his sons fight over control of the Philadelphia Athletics, watch it go bankrupt at Connie Mack Stadium, then sell it off and can’t stop it from moving to Kansas City.We’re just pleased that having had nearly six months to get through this final volume, we’re still not sure if the effort this time was inspiring enough to go back and dig through the first two tomes we’d previously set aside, mostly because of intimidation.Continue reading “30 baseball books for April ’16, Day 27: Holy Mack-erel” »

Yasiel Puig, left, talks with Arizona Diamondbacks left fielder Yasmany Tomas, right, in center field before the start of the Dodgers home opener on April 12. Both are Cuban defectors. (AP Photo/Alex Gallardo)

The pitch: Yasiel Puig and Aroldis Chapman made us read this.
So did President Obama, who paraded in with the Tampa Bay Rays onto Cuban soil this past spring for an exhibition game/demonstration of what ports of business American baseball can open.
Our curiosity about how this all plays into human trafficking also drew us in.
And, because it’s Bjarkman, a writer for BaseballdeCuba.com and frequent SABR award winner in this field, we felt we were getting it straight.
For example, he’s already won an award from the baseball super-research group for this particular effort.
Aside from his resume of biographical histories and encyclopedias, kids series books and baseball “scrapbook” series, he did, In 2014, did a history of Cuban baseball from 1864-2006. In 2005, he did “Diamonds Around the Globe: The Encyclopedia of International Baseball” which also won a SABR award. In 1999, it was “Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball.”
Bjarkman writes in his intro that his attempt to “explore the daring and often tortuous migrations of some of the better-known Cuban stars who have abandoned low-wage celebrity status in their homeland to endure life-altering (and occasionally life threatening) pilgrimages in search of multimillion-dollar celebrity status on center stage in Norther American major leagues” is as complex a thing to watch as well as write about.
There are “proud successes” and “soft underbelly failures,” not just of the Cuban socialist baseball structure but how the MLB operates and benefits itself.
Bjarkman most notably argues “our mainstream media – especially in the wake of Barack Obama’s bold December 2014 efforts at placing a belated wedge in a long-standing United States-Cuba stalemate – has rather badly misconstrued and misreported the stories of Cuban ballplayers” flocking to the U.S.
“Popular press accounts have mostly gotten the whole story essentially backwards” and in the end, “Cuban talent drain may now haunt MLB’s survival every bit as much as it haunts Cuba’s own baseball future.”Continue reading “30 baseball books for April ’16, Day 26: Holy Yasiel, and in Bjarkman we trust with Cuba’s baseball lore” »

The pitch: Where you been, Buck?
John “Buck” Martinez is a voice that needs to be heard, but lately, you need to live in Toronto to do so.
Seventeen years as a big-league catcher (Kansas City, Milwaukee, Toronto), 28 years as a broadcaster (an analyst at ESPN and TBS, also with the Blue Jays, but now doing play-by-play for the Blue Jays on Rogers SportsNet, along with Dan Shulman), and a little more than a season as a Blue Jays manager (2001-June of 2002). That’s enough of a resume to resume interest in what his take might be on today’s game.
Old school? All the way. But in a good way.
From page 227: “We have learned so much about this game. We have found so many new ways to analyze it. So many new ways to evaluate and judge talent. We have, in many ways, come a long way. But if you really think about it, for all this talk about how the game has changed, the formula for winning has stayed the same: homegrown talent, pitching, defense and a team that knows how to play together. Sometimes a clear view forward requires a good, long look back. And that’s how you change up.”
That’s the message he leaves the reader with after the previous 21 chapters reinforce his beliefs that “teams” today have been lost to “individual brands,” too much time is spent on hitting instead of fielding, and there’s not enough “feel of the game” is taken into account when decisions are made.Continue reading “30 baseball books for April ’16, Day 25: Buck stops by for an update … from the crouch, not grouch, position” »

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